How to control your smart home without yelling at a dumb voice assistant

Enlarge / We don't have to rely on megacorp obelisks to operate the things we buy. We don't have to learn their language. We can break free. (credit: PonyWang/Getty Images)

For many people, an automated smart home is about little things that add up to big conveniences over time. Lights turning on when you pull into the driveway, a downstairs thermostat adjustable from your upstairs bedroom, a robot vacuum working while you're at the grocery store—you put in a bit of setup work and your life gets easier.

What most smart homes also include, however, is a voice assistant, the opposite of a quiet, unseen convenience. Alexa, Siri, Google Assistant: They demand that you learn specific device names and structures for commands, while they frequently get even the most simple command astoundingly wrong. And they are, of course, an always-listening corporate microphone you're allowing inside your home.

There are ways to keep that smart home convenience while cutting out the conversation. Some involve your phone, some dedicated devices, but none of them involve saying a device's name. Here's an overview of the best options available.

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Sony: Would-be PlayStation 5 buyers “should have a much easier time” now

Enlarge / The PlayStation 5.

In a blog post published on Monday, Sony hardware VP Isabelle Tomatis announced that there is now an "increased supply" of PlayStation 5 game consoles after more than two years of shortages. "If you’re looking to purchase a PS5 console, you should now have a much easier time finding one at retailers globally," she wrote.

This is the second time this month Sony has publicly said that it believes its PlayStation 5 supply woes have concluded—the first was during a press conference at this year's Consumer Electronics Show.

In the blog post, Tomatis pinned the prior struggles on "unprecedented demand." That seems to be true, according to analysts who watch Sony and the video game industry—but there may have been other factors at play, such as pandemic-related supply constraints for some components.

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GitHub says hackers cloned code-signing certificates in breached repository

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GitHub said unknown intruders gained unauthorized access to some of its code repositories and stole code-signing certificates for two of its desktop applications: Desktop and Atom.

Code-signing certificates place a cryptographic stamp on code to verify it was developed by the listed organization, which in this case is GitHub. If decrypted, the certificates could allow an attacker to sign unofficial versions of the apps that had been maliciously tampered with and pass them off as legitimate updates from GitHub. Current versions of Desktop and Atom are unaffected by the credential theft.

“A set of encrypted code signing certificates were exfiltrated; however, the certificates were password-protected and we have no evidence of malicious use,” the company wrote in an advisory. “As a preventative measure, we will revoke the exposed certificates used for the GitHub Desktop and Atom applications.”

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The generative AI revolution has begun—how did we get here?

Enlarge / This image was partially AI-generated with the prompt "a pair of robot hands holding pencils drawing a pair of human hands, oil painting, colorful," inspired by the classic M.C. Escher drawing. Watching AI mangle drawing hands helps us feel superior to the machines... for now. —Aurich (credit: Aurich Lawson | Stable Diffusion)

Progress in AI systems often feels cyclical. Every few years, computers can suddenly do something they’ve never been able to do before. “Behold!” the AI true believers proclaim, “the age of artificial general intelligence is at hand!” “Nonsense!” the skeptics say. “Remember self-driving cars?”

The truth usually lies somewhere in between.

We’re in another cycle, this time with generative AI. Media headlines are dominated by news about AI art, but there’s also unprecedented progress in many widely disparate fields. Everything from videos to biology, programming, writing, translation, and more is seeing AI progress at the same incredible pace.

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HBO’s The Last of Us tries a little tenderness in a surprising episode 3

Enlarge / Paranoid survivalist is the part Nick Offerman was born to play.

New episodes of The Last of Us are premiering on HBO every Sunday night, and Ars' Kyle Orland (who has played the games) and Andrew Cunningham (who hasn't) will be talking about them here every Monday morning. While these recaps don't delve into every single plot point of the episodes, there are obviously heavy spoilers contained within, so go watch the episode first if you want to go in fresh.

Kyle: OK, I know I spent a lot of time last week complaining about flashbacks, but I have many fewer complaints about this week's extended flashback. This is the kind of important, character-driven backstory that was only hinted at in the games and which a prestige TV show feels particularly well-suited to fill in, and this episode did a beautiful job of it.

Andrew: Yes, this week's episode is genuinely lovely and unexpected—essentially an episode of a The Last of Us-themed anthology show that is bookended with 10 or 15 minutes of Joel and Ellie on either side. It's also a tonal break from what I am sure will be a whole lot of fighting, running, and chasing later on in the season.

And it's also an antidote for the show's earlier reliance on tropes. "Loner conspiracy theorist captures the love of his life in one of his bunker traps" is not a story beat you see repeated in most apocalypse stories.

You mentioned that this was hinted at in the games. Is there a source for these characters (or similar ones) in the games at all, or are the showrunners just branching out?

Kyle: So this is where things get interesting from an "authentic to the game" perspective. Bill is a relatively major character in the first Last of Us, but his relationship with Frank is barely mentioned directly. And without spoiling the game too much, I'll say that the way Bill (and Frank, in a much less direct way) see their story develop and conclude in the games is very different from what we saw in this episode.

From the moment Bill got shot in the show, it started me wondering—how much are they really playing with the expectations set by the game here? How much are they willing to change the narrative we're supposed to "know"? Could Bill really just die here?

It's a big contributor to my feelings of doubt that the apparent double suicide is the last we're gonna see of this character. Not to mention it'd be a criminal waste of a perfectly cast Nick Offerman.

*Ron Swanson voice* "I am uncomfortable with this situation."

Andrew: As a non-game-player with no particular expectations or attachments, I kind of hope the story is a one-off, something that gives the world texture and does fill in Joel's and Tess' histories a bit but isn't continually revisited. To bring up another video game-adjacent show, it reminds me a little of the once-per-season flashback episodes in Mythic Quest. They're usually far removed from the main action (and most of the main characters) of the story but give the show a chance to demonstrate its range and give viewers something special.

But it's hard to say! Flashbacks seem to be a tool the show is willing to deploy frequently, and any character can come back to life in a flashback (as Tess does, here). Do the games do much flashing back and forward like this? It's hard to imagine playing the game version of this episode, unless The Last of Us has a farm sim game embedded in it, Gwent-style.

Kyle: No, the first game is quite linear, timeline-wise.

I'm trying really hard not to be one of those "they changed something from the source material! Sacrilege!"-type people. But one quibble I do have is with how changing Bill's story arc also changes the entire tone of his character.

There's one important Bill quote from the game that I remembered the gist of and looked up to make sure I had it right, because it's so opposed to the Bill we get in the show: "Once upon a time, I had somebody that I cared about. It was a partner. Somebody I had to look after. And in this world, that sort of shit's good for one thing: gettin' you killed."

Not exactly the sentiment we get here! I don't think either one is necessarily "better" or "worse" (especially before I see the rest of the show), but it is pretty jarring...

Andrew: So game-Bill essentially ends up where show-Bill starts, emotionally? That's a bummer.

Which is maybe why they changed it. I find apocalypse fiction with a shot of hope much more compelling than, say, a non-stop bleak-o-rama where we're continually finding out that humans are the real monsters (looking at you, The Walking Dead).

Or maybe they haven't changed it, and they'll get back around to that version of Bill in another episode. That's the fun of these show-by-show recaps: something could always happen next week that either makes us look like geniuses or morons!

If you've played the games, get ready to see a different side of Bill, here...

Kyle: OK, so I may be seeing things that aren't there, but did you think anything of the pretty prominent front-door-shutting moment when Joel was searching through Bill's house?

Andrew: Yeah, you may well have something there. We are told that Bill took the same wine-poison as Frank; we are specifically and pointedly never shown it.

Kyle: I half expected to see Bill looking out the window during that last shot...

Andrew: But even if he were still alive there would still be some conflict between the tone of his note to Joel and that quote from the game.

Kyle: Yeah, and Bill giving away his guns and stuff doesn't necessarily fit, either.

Oh yeah, Ellie is in this episode too, I guess...

Andrew: It would be a weird fake-out. For whose benefit is Bill faking his own death? For whose benefit is he leaving all his wine glasses out to get all dusty?? I guess he's... doing it and then waiting weeks or months for "whoever finds this, but probably Joel" to show up?

Kyle: The meat was not all that rotten, so it probably had only been a few days. Bill could have still been mourning for that time, then he runs off when Joel shows up to preserve his solitude?

Andrew: If he ain't dead, there's some 'splaining to do, is all I'm saying.

Kyle: Yeah, I don't know how much of this is just wishful thinking on my part and how much is actually there. But as much as I like Ellie-from-the-games, I think I might like Bill-from-the-show even more. And part of me doesn't want this episode to be all we get of him.

Andrew: Offerman is criminally charismatic here. And most places.

Kyle: Anyway, the comic book rules apply. No body, no death.

Andrew: One other thing that always piques my interest in any kind of "alternate history" story like this: how much of the "real world" is the world we know? According to this episode, 9/11 happened and 9/11 truthers exist. Which suggests that George W. Bush existed and was president. Which implies that pretty much anything that happened before September of 2003 is theoretically real in this world, too?

Which means we're living in a world where Joel may have seen Shrek (2001), but not Shrek 2 (2004). Something to think about.

No room in the QZ, sorry folks!

Kyle: Do you think Linda Ronstadt survived the outbreak in the show? Here in the real world she won a Grammy for Best Music Film in 2021!

Andrew: It's entirely possible. Though, if the show wanted to stunt-cast some real-world celebrities as infected, she could be a contender.

Also, if we're talking about period-appropriateness, there's a whole weird cul-de-sac my brain got stuck in about where opinion about gay people in America would have been if it was frozen in 2003. Queer Eye for the Straight Guy had only started in July! Brokeback Mountain never came out! Modern Family never happened!

Kyle: Makes the marriage at the end much more meaningful. It wasn't legalized in Massachusetts until 2004!

Andrew: Cue zombie Antonin Scalia coming in and telling them they can't do it.

Regardless of the ultimate fate of Bill, or whether Joel has seen Shrek (I'm just saying, he had a kid who would have been the right age!), I thought this episode was a cut above the ones we've seen so far. Not that either of them was bad, but this one has raised the show's average rating from "competent but predictable" to "maybe this could actually be really great?"

That said, I feel like I have seen three episodes of this, and each one has given me a different show: apocalypse-by-the-numbers, then video game tutorial level, then a one-act play about love in the time of cordyceps. I can't help but wonder which show The Last of Us is going to be next week.

Kyle: Agreed. It feels like some people who would really like this episode might struggle to get through the first two, which are so different. But slowing down the world-building and just focusing on two characters really let the emotions shine through.

That also happened a lot in the game, just not with those two characters. So I'm still looking forward to diving deep into the Joel/Ellie dynamic, which we started to get some real hints of this episode.

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The flight tracker that powered @ElonJet has taken a left turn

Enlarge (credit: SeongJoon Cho/Bloomberg/Getty Images)

A major independent flight tracking platform, which has made enemies of the Saudi royal family and Elon Musk, has been sold to a subsidiary of a private equity firm. And its users are furious.

ADS-B Exchange has made headlines in recent months for, as AFP put it, irking “billionaires and baddies.” But in a Wednesday morning press release, aviation intelligence firm Jetnet announced it had acquired the scrappy open source operation for an undisclosed sum.

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Most criminal cryptocurrency is funneled through just 5 exchanges

Enlarge (credit: Eugene Mymrin/Getty Images)

For years, the cryptocurrency economy has been rife with black market sales, theft, ransomware, and money laundering—despite the strange fact that in that economy, practically every transaction is written into a blockchain’s permanent, unchangeable ledger. But new evidence suggests that years of advancements in blockchain tracing and crackdowns on that illicit underworld may be having an effect—if not reducing the overall volume of crime, then at least cutting down on the number of laundering outlets, leaving the crypto black market with fewer options to cash out its proceeds than it’s had in a decade.

In a portion of its annual crime report focused on money laundering that was published today, cryptocurrency-tracing firm Chainalysis points to a new consolidation in crypto criminal cash-out services over the past year. It counted just 915 of those services used in 2022, the fewest it’s seen since 2012 and the latest sign of a steady drop-off in the number of those services since 2018. Chainalysis says an even smaller number of exchanges now enable the money-laundering trade of cryptocurrency for actual dollars, euros, and yen: It found that just five cryptocurrency exchanges now handle nearly 68 percent of all black market cash-outs.

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Annual? Bivalent? For all? Future of COVID shots murky after FDA deliberations

Enlarge / Dr. Peter Marks, director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research within the Food and Drug Administration, testifies during a Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee hearing on the federal coronavirus response on Capitol Hill in March 2021, in Washington, DC. (credit: Getty | Pool)

The US Food and Drug Administration's committee of independent vaccine experts gathered Thursday to discuss the future of COVID-19 shots. The meeting seemed primed for explosive debate. Earlier in the week, the FDA released documents that made clear the agency is holding steadfast to its idea that COVID vaccines will fit the mold of annual flu shots—with reformulations decided in the first half of each year, followed by fall rollouts in anticipation of winter waves.

But outside experts, including some on the FDA's advisory committee, have questioned almost every aspect of that plan—from the uncertain seasonality of COVID-19 so far, to the futility of chasing fast-moving variants (or subvariants, as the case may be). Some have even questioned whether there's a need to boost the young and healthy so frequently when current vaccines offer protection against severe disease, but only short-lived protection against infection.

One particularly outspoken member of FDA's committee, Paul Offit, a pediatrician and infectious disease expert at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, has publicly assailed the bivalent booster, writing a commentary piece in the New England Journal of Medicine earlier this month titled: Bivalent Covid-19 Vaccines — A Cautionary Tale. (The FDA's advisory committee voted 19-2 in support of the bivalent boosters last year, with Offit being one of the two votes against.)

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Brawling through a wacky version of Japan’s past in Like a Dragon: Ishin!

Enlarge / Don't bring a knife to a historical Japanese gunfight.

Sega’s cult-favorite Yakuza series is in a league of its own in its ability to blend brutal, stylish combat with a heartfelt and endearingly melodramatic storyline. Following the success of 2020’s Yakuza: Like a Dragon and the spinoff Judgement series, the over-the-top and unapologetically earnest action series has made great strides in reaching a larger audience worldwide.

With the franchise’s 20th anniversary approaching, Sega is making a larger push for the series, now known simply as Like a Dragon, in the West. Like a Dragon: Ishin! is an upgraded visit to one of the franchise’s most elusive games and the first chance for Western audiences to circle back to the sprawling story’s 19th-century origins.

After some time with the game’s early chapters, it’s clear this remake reaffirms the series’ signature approach to marrying absurd yet poignant storylines with action encounters that come right out of a comic book.

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Requiem for a string: Charting the rise and fall of a theory of everything

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

String theory began over 50 years ago as a way to understand the strong nuclear force. Since then, it’s grown to become a theory of everything, capable of explaining the nature of every particle, every force, every fundamental constant, and the existence of the Universe itself. But despite decades of work, it has failed to deliver on its promise.

What went wrong, and where do we go from here?

Beginning threads

Like most revolutions, string theory had humble origins. It started in the 1960s as an attempt to understand the workings of the strong nuclear force, which had only recently been discovered. Quantum field theory, which had been used successfully to explain electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force, wasn’t cutting it, so physicists were eager for something new.

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Rocket Report: NASA validates new engine design; Chinese firm tests mini Starship

Enlarge / United Launch Alliance hoists its Vulcan Cert-1 booster into the Vertical Integration Facility at Cape Canaveral. (credit: United Launch Alliance)

Welcome to Edition 5.23 of the Rocket Report! This has been a really fun week for US rockets: Electron made a smashing debut in a launch from Virginia, Vulcan went vertical in Florida, and Starship passed a key test en route to its first orbital launch. I'm looking forward to more great leaps in launch later this year.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Rocket Lab makes successful US debut. For years, the Electron rocket and the company behind it had been stuck in limbo at the Virginia launch site, waiting on various approvals—for regulatory agencies to share enough paperwork with each other to convince everyone that the launch was safe. Then weather and the end-of-year holidays kept pushing the launch back. But on Tuesday, everything went as smoothly as it is possible to imagine, and the Electron shot to orbit almost as soon as the launch window opened, Ars reports.

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By learning to hunt otters, wolves decimate a deer population

Enlarge / So cute yet—for some animals—so tasty. (credit: Arthur Morris)

People love otters, wolves, and deer. Respectively, they’re crafty, intelligent, and majestic. Put them all together on an island, though, and things get unpleasant pretty quickly. These are the findings of a new paper analyzing how a wolf population came to Pleasant Island in Alaska, learned to hunt otters, and, using this unexpected food source, thrived to the point of wiping out the native Sitka black-tailed deer population.

“To the best of our knowledge, the deer population is decimated. We haven't found evidence of deer recolonizing the islands,” Gretchen Roffler, wildlife research biologist for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game and an author of the paper, told Ars.

Deer diary

The deer have been on Pleasant Island for a long time. The sea otters had also been in the waters off the coast of Alaska until the fur trade killed most of them off by the late 1800s or early 1900s, Roffler said. However, the otters were declared an endangered species, and a population was reintroduced to the area in the 1960s. In the 1980s, they moved into the waters near Pleasant Island and continued to propagate.

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RSA’s demise from quantum attacks is very much exaggerated, expert says

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Three weeks ago, panic swept across some corners of the security world after researchers discovered a breakthrough that, at long last, put the cracking of the widely used RSA encryption scheme within reach by using quantum computing.

Scientists and cryptographers have known for two decades that a factorization method known as Shor’s algorithm makes it theoretically possible for a quantum computer with sufficient resources to break RSA. That’s because the secret prime numbers that underpin the security of an RSA key are easy to calculate using Shor’s algorithm. Computing the same primes using classical computing takes billions of years.

The only thing holding back this doomsday scenario is the massive amount of computing resources required for Shor’s algorithm to break RSA keys of sufficient size. The current estimate is that breaking a 1,024-bit or 2,048-bit RSA key requires a quantum computer with vast resources. Specifically, those resources are about 20 million qubits and about eight hours of them running in superposition. (A qubit is a basic unit of quantum computing, analogous to the binary bit in classical computing. But whereas a classic binary bit can represent only a single binary value such as a 0 or 1, a qubit is represented by a superposition of multiple possible states.)

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These scientists created jewelry out of the striking shapes of chaos theory

Enlarge / Chaotic shapes 3D-printed in bronze represent the first step in the transformation from chaos to manufacturable forms. (credit: F. Bertacchini/P.S. Pantano/E. Bilotta)

A team of Italian scientists has figured out a way of turning the striking, complex twisting shapes of chaos theory into actual jewelry, according to a new paper published in the journal Chaos. These pieces aren't simply inspired by chaos theory; they were directly created from its mathematical principles.

"Seeing the chaotic shapes transformed into real, polished, shiny, physical jewelry was a great pleasure for the whole team. Touching and wearing them was also extremely exciting," said co-author Eleonora Bilotta of the University of Calabria. "We think it is the same joy that a scientist feels when her theory takes form, or when an artist finishes a painting."

The concept of chaos might suggest complete randomness, but to scientists, it denotes systems that are so sensitive to initial conditions that their output appears random, obscuring their underlying internal rules of order: the stock market, rioting crowds, brain waves during an epileptic seizure, or the weather. In a chaotic system, tiny effects are amplified through repetition until the system goes critical. The roots of today's chaos theory rest on a serendipitous discovery in the 1960s by mathematician-turned-meteorologist Edward Lorenz.

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Lawsuit: Twitter stopped paying rent at headquarters after Musk took over

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson)

Twitter is being sued for alleged nonpayment of rent by the owner of its US headquarters building in San Francisco, the latest of several lawsuits saying Twitter stopped paying bills after Elon Musk bought the company.

The lawsuit, filed Friday by SRI Nine Market Square LLC, says Twitter leases 462,855 square feet on eight floors of the 1355 Market Street building but failed to pay $3.36 million in rent due in December 2022. Twitter also failed to pay rent of $3.43 million in January 2023, according to the complaint filed in California Superior Court in San Francisco County.

SRI had a letter of credit with Twitter amounting to $3.6 million "as security for Defendant's performance of its obligations under the Lease," the lawsuit said. Because Twitter failed to pay rent, SRI drew on the letter of credit, and it is now down to $1, the complaint said. Twitter allegedly failed to replenish the letter of credit as required by the lease.

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PC peripheral makers are feeling tech’s pandemic boom hangover too

Enlarge (credit: Scharon Harding)

What goes up must come down, the tech industry is feeling that law right now. From historically low PC sales to depressing waves of layoffs hitting big names like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and HP, companies are having to readjust after getting used to business-fueling pandemic conditions like lockdowns and working from home. The latest is Logitech, one of the kings of the tech pandemic boom, which is painting us another picture of the downsides that come with those short-lived highs.

On Monday, Logitech announced its Q3 fiscal year 2023 results, which covers the three-month period ending December 31, 2022. Sales fell 22 percent compared to Q3 of the prior fiscal year. This includes drops in PC webcams (49 percent decline), audio and wearables (34 percent), mobile speakers (32 percent), keyboard and keyboard combos (22 percent), and pointing devices (14 percent). In the nine-month period ending on December 31, Logitech saw a 16 percent decline in year-over-year net sales. (This includes streaming services revenue from its Streamlabs division.)

That's quite the contrast from May, when Logitech announced record sales from April 2021 to March 31, 2022 (fiscal year 2022), and from April 2021, when the company announced a 76 percent increase in sales year-over-year from April 2020 to March 2021.

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Fearing ChatGPT, Google enlists founders Brin and Page in AI fight

Enlarge / An illustration of a chatbot exploding onto the scene, being very threatening. (credit: Benj Edwards / Ars Technica)

ChatGPT has Google spooked. On Friday, The New York Times reported that Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin held several emergency meetings with company executives about OpenAI's new chatbot, which Google feels could threaten its $149 billion search business.

Created by OpenAI and launched in late November 2022, the large language model (LLM) known as ChatGPT stunned the world with its conversational ability to answer questions, generate text in many styles, aid with programming, and more.

Google is now scrambling to catch up, with CEO Sundar Pichai declaring a “code red” to spur new AI development. According to the Times, Google hopes to reveal more than 20 new products—and demonstrate a version of its search engine with chatbot features—at some point this year.

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SpaceX may perform a wet dress rehearsal of its Starship launch system today

Enlarge / A fully stacked Starship launch system is seen on January 9, 2023. (credit: SpaceX)

After months of preparation, SpaceX is now approaching the critical test phase of its launch campaign for the massive Starship vehicle.

The company has evacuated nearby residents from the launch site in South Texas, near Boca Chica Beach, during the hours of 8 am CT (14:00 UTC) to 8 pm CT on Monday. If preparatory activities go well, the company will load both the Starship upper stage and Super Heavy booster with cryogenic methane and oxygen later today. The countdown will proceed toward liftoff but end just before the transfer of internal power to the launch vehicle.

There will be no engine ignition today. However this upper stage of this vehicle, Ship 24, previously underwent a successful static fire test of its six Raptor rocket engines on September 8, 2022. The first stage, Booster 7, has seen as many as 14 of its 33 Raptor engines test fired during activity back in November.

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M2 Pro Mac mini review: Apple’s Goldilocks desktop for semi-professionals

Enlarge / Apple's 2023 Mac mini. If you've seen one, you've seen them all, but it's what's on the inside that counts. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Apple's Mac Studio was its most interesting desktop in years. It lacks the internal expandability of the Mac Pro, but the raw performance and power efficiency of the M1 Max and M1 Ultra plus a great port selection make it a viable option for plenty of people who would have bought a fully loaded 27-inch iMac or a low-to-mid-end Mac Pro in the Intel era.

But the $2,000-and-up desktop is still overkill for a lot of people, even for pros and power users. There was a lot of room between the cheapest Studio and the best M1 Mac mini for a cheaper-but-more-capable system, something for people who could benefit from pro-level performance and extra ports occasionally but who don't need them often enough to justify dropping the money on a Mac Studio.

Enter the new Mac minis. Both the M2 and M2 Pro versions are augmented in ways that will benefit multi-monitor multitasking workstations, and they can do so for substantially less money than the Studio—the M2 mini starts at $599, $100 cheaper than the M1 mini and cheaper than any Mac mini has been since 2014. Apple sent us the M2 Pro version of the mini to review, and for many price-conscious power users who prefer or require macOS, it injects just the right amount of Mac Studio performance into the mini's 13-year-old design.

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Kyle and Andrew sneak through The Last of Us’ by-the-book second episode

Enlarge / I'm sure they'll both be fine.

New episodes of The Last of Us are premiering on HBO every Sunday night, and Ars' Kyle Orland (who's played the games) and Andrew Cunningham (who hasn't) will be talking about them here every Monday morning. While these recaps don't delve into every single plot point of the premiere episode, there are obviously heavy spoilers contained within, so go watch the episode first if you want to go in fresh.

Andrew: We talked last week about my concerns that the show would struggle to feel like an "adaptation" as opposed to straightforward apocalypse fiction, and let me just say, without even having played the game, there was a lot that felt "video gamey" to me about this episode. Beyond the zombie encounters, there's something about a bombed-out shell of a recognizable place—ruined but weirdly beautiful in places where nature has re-asserted itself—that feels specific to video games. Weird to think of a TV show as having "level design," but that's what the ruined museum and waterlogged hotel lobby put me in the mind of.

Kyle: Yeah, one reason for that is probably that this episode was direct by Neil Druckmann, who co-wrote and co-directed the games. So it's not shocking that a lot of moments in this episode play out as pretty direct re-creations of the games' first encounter with the clickers. I half expected a "mash the square button" prompt to appear on screen at a few points during the action scenes.For the most part I wish the show was a little less faithful and a little more concise here. The fights with the infected end up a lot less interesting as a passive observer, compared to someone controlling the protagonists.

Andrew: Ah, yes, I'm sorry, the "clickers." I forgot, characters in zombie fiction are not allowed to use the Z-word.Yeah, the fight was well-executed but pretty predictable. The design on the clickers is cool, relative to plain-old Romero-y zombies, but I assume those are lifted mostly straight from the games. Otherwise it did feel a lot like the initial encounter in a video game would—just a couple of monsters in an enclosed space to give you a feel for the flow of combat before it starts throwing more complicated fights at you.

Anything that did surprise you in this episode, as someone who basically knows where all of this is going?

Time for another combat tutorial.

Kyle: Well, from the start I was kind of surprised we went back to pre-outbreak times for that Indonesia scene. To me that mostly that felt like a lot of wasted time going over stuff we already knew. The whole point of the story is that it doesn't matter precisely how the infection happened, humanity has to deal with the shitty aftermath regardless.It was a long way to go to set up the fact that bombs are a good solution to a lot of infected at once, which I think becomes relatively self-evident even without that scene.

Andrew: It does also mean that the episode has two instances of people talking about bombs without actually having to go to the expense of showing bombs.I do wonder if going back to "Before" or "During" is going to be a regular thing, and that this sort of unremarkable flashback is setting us up for possibly more interesting ones down the line. Agreed that it didn't feel vitally necessary here, especially because Internet sleuths basically figured everything in that scene out from breadcrumbs dropped in the first episode.

But yes, put me down as "generally uninterested in flashbacks that show us things we could have assumed given already-available information."

Kyle: Yeah, after playing through dozens of hours in the post-outbreak world of the games, I never found myself thinking "gee I wish we knew more about what caused all this." But the showrunners seem to feel differently.This is probably unfair because I've grown to love Ellie through the games, but... do you love Ellie yet?

Only the youngest members of the cast can crouch like this for extended periods.

Andrew: I liked her in this episode! Yes, obviously, still a smart-mouth, and I am sure there are people who find her one-note, but you do get some moments of vulnerability and innocence in this episode that I talked about wanting to see more of last week. And as someone born post-apocalypse, she is a handy audience surrogate for explanations about the monsters and the world.All things considered, still just my second-favorite child who is being escorted through a hostile wilderness by Pedro Pascal on an expensive-looking sci-fi show. But there's a surprising amount of competition in that category.

Kyle: All in all, I think they did a good job setting up Tess' noble/technically cost-free-at-that-point sacrifice, paving the way for the core Joel/Ellie relationship that was always obviously going to drive the show (even if you haven't played the games).

Andrew: Yeah, like I said last week (and, I suspect, will continue to say?), it's all tropey as hell but well-done enough that you mostly don't care? You knew the moment that Ellie and Tess seemed to be bonding that Tess was not going to make it out of the episode (the fact that there are, uh, fewer than three people in all the promotional material for the show is another giveaway).Even without foreknowledge of the games, you can see the Unlikely Bond between Joel and Ellie coming from a mile away. All the beats of both major monster fights were textbook. Will the monster walk by without noticing them? Will Tess manage to use the flaky lighter? You know the answer to both.

You can almost hear the f-bombs to come.

Kyle: Yeah, I was fully ready for the last-second lighter drop, but I was not ready for that close-up, open-eyed cordyceps kiss. That image is gonna stick with me just as much as some of the more gruesome "you died in a particularly horrible way" cut scenes in the games.

Andrew: Yeah, you're right. An excellent example of how the show keeps things just interesting enough that you can forgive the less-surprising elements of it. It also helps that Pascal plays a very watchable TV grump.

Kyle: Not to be all "Final Fantasy gets really good after the first 10 hours," but I feel like we're all set for the show to really hit its stride after over two hours of setup.

Andrew: That's one place where the show's passivity is a good thing relative to a game: if it's boring you can keep half an eye on your phone or something and still make progress. Much easier to watch clunky exposition or unnecessary flashbacks than to force yourself to pay attention to hours of sloggy tutorial.

Kyle: This was basically my wife's experience half-watching me play the first game and looking up for the cut scenes, and I have to say, I can see the appeal.

Andrew: That's the big twist: This isn't a show at all! We're just watching footage of someone's Twitch stream.

Kyle: We pan back from the series finale, and sitting at the PS5 holding a controller is... Nathan Drake.

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Archaeologists discovered a new papyrus of Egyptian Book of the Dead

Enlarge / Sample illustration from an Egyptian Book of the Dead—not the newly discovered papyrus—depicting the "weighing of the heart." (credit: Public domain)

Archaeologists have confirmed that a papyrus scroll discovered at the Saqquara necropolis site near Cairo last year does indeed contain texts from the Egyptian Book of the Dead—the first time a complete papyrus has been found in a century, according to Mostafa Waziri, secretary-general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities in Egypt. The scroll has been dubbed the "Waziri papyrus." It is currently being translated into Arabic.

Fans of the 1999 film The Mummy know that the Egyptian Book of the Dead plays a key role in bringing the cursed high priest Imhotep back to terrorize the living. The reality is naturally quite different: notably, there is not one magical copy of the Book of the Dead, as depicted in the film; there were many versions over the centuries, all unique, with the choice of spells often tailored to the specific needs of deceased royals and (later) high-ranking members of Egyptian society.

These "books" were actually collections of funerary texts and spells to help the deceased on their journey through the underworld (Duat)—not to bring people back from the dead—and they are not holy texts like the Bible or Qur-an. They were originally painted onto objects or written on the walls of burial chambers. Over time, illustrations were added and spells were also inscribed on the interior of coffins or the linen shrouds used to wrap the deceased.

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The weekend’s best deals: The newest MacBook Pros, Kindle Kids, iPad Air, and more.

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It's the weekend, and that means another Dealmaster. In this week's roundup of the best tech deals on the web, we have Fire HD and Kindle tablets from Amazon, some solidly-discounted computer peripherals, and even Apple's just-announced MacBook Pros have a price cut.

Amazon's Kindle Kids e-reader is down to a record-low of $85 (typically $120). It's the same device as the latest Kindle ($100), but it comes with a case, two-year warranty, and one-year subscription to Amazon Kids+. All of that typically costs $20 more than the regular Kindle device, but this sale price now makes the Kindle Kids version less expensive.

In our review, we mention that the latest Kindle and Kindle Paperwhite are neck-and-neck as two of Amazon's best low-end Kindles. They have few frills and do what they're meant to well: help you consume books textually or audibly. We also note that it's particularly great for kids even without the kids version perks because of it's size and ability to play audiobooks. The added value of the kids version makes it a great buy for all ages.

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Twitter retroactively changes developer agreement to ban third-party clients

Enlarge / Here's the line that Twitter added to its API Developer Agreement on Jan. 19, two days after it cited "long-standing API rules" for why third-party apps may not be working. (credit: diffchecker)

"Long-standing" can apparently mean "tomorrow" at Elon Musk's Twitter, as the company has changed its developer agreement to seemingly justify its banning of third-party clients. The change happened two days after a vague tweet about "enforcing long-standing API rules" without pointing to any.

As noted by Internet sage Andy Baio, a text comparison (diff check) of Twitter's developer agreement between the effective dates of October 10, 2022, and January 19, 2023, shows only one change besides the effective date: a new line added to the section "Restrictions on Use of Licensed Materials." The addition restricts the ability of developers to:

c) use or access the Licensed Materials to create or attempt to create a substitute or similar service or product to the Twitter Applications;

With that, Twitter put an end to an era, one in which third-party clients not only coexisted with Twitter's official app—originally based on Tweetie, an early third-party app itself—but often introduced and drove new features. Twitter's official apps and its website are now the only reliable ways to access the service.

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Musk oversaw staged Tesla self-driving video, emails show

Enlarge / Elon Musk, chief executive officer of Tesla Inc., arrives at court during the SolarCity trial in Wilmington, Delaware, on Tuesday, July 13, 2021. Musk was cool but combative as he testified in a Delaware courtroom that Tesla's more than $2 billion acquisition of SolarCity in 2016 wasn't a bailout of the struggling solar provider. Musk was triumphant in that case, but he's got plenty more legal trouble to wriggle out from. (credit: Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

If there was any doubt that Tesla CEO Elon Musk knew the company's much-watched 2016 self-driving demo was staged, emails obtained by Bloomberg should lay that to rest. "Just want to be absolutely clear that everyone’s top priority is achieving an amazing Autopilot demo drive," Musk wrote in an email. "Since this is a demo, it is fine to hardcode some of it, since we will backfill with production code later in an OTA update."

Musk saw little wrong with this strategy, saying, "I will be telling the world that this is what the car *will* be able to do, not that it can do this upon receipt," he wrote. But instead of making this clear, the video, released to the world via Musk's Twitter account, opens instead with white text on a black background telling the viewer that "the person in the driver's seat is only there for legal reasons. He is not doing anything. The car is driving itself."

Musk took to Twitter on the day of the video's release to tell his followers that the car could read parking signs, and it knew not to park in a disabled spot. He also claimed that someone could use the "Summon" function on a car parked on the other side of the country.

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Rocket Report: SpaceX reaches ‘ludicrous’ cadence; ABL explains RS1 failure

Enlarge / A Falcon 9 rocket launches on Wednesday morning carrying a GPS III satellite into orbit. (credit: Trevor Mahlmann)

Welcome to Edition 5.24 of the Rocket Report! I have a blurb about this below, but for me the news of the week is that SpaceX not only launched a Falcon Heavy rocket, but two other Falcon 9 missions on separate coasts as well in just five days. The operational challenges of this are immense and, I think, underappreciated outside of people directly involved in this kind of work.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

ABL updates on RS1 failure. On Wednesday ABL Space Systems provided an update on the January 10 failure of its RS1 launch vehicle. Long story short, the first stage of the vehicle suffered a "complete loss of power" at 10.87 seconds into flight, leading to a simultaneous shutdown of all nine of the vehicle's main engines. The rocket impacted the ground about 20 meters from the launch site. "Approximately 95 percent of the vehicle total propellant mass was still onboard, creating an energetic explosion and over-pressure wave that caused damage to nearby equipment and facilities," the company said.

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The first “Bored Ape” NFT game costs $2,300+ for three weeks of play

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Owners of Yuga Labs' infamous "Bored Ape" non-fungible tokens (and related crypto tokens) get free access to a simple endless runner/tunnel racing game called Dookey Dash today. But some members of the "exclusive" Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) are already selling a chance to play the time-limited game for thousands of dollars on the secondary market.

Listings on the OpenSea exchange show a current floor price of 1.49 ETH (about $2,293) for a "Sewer Pass" NFT that grants access to Dookey Dash until February 8. In less than 24 hours, the exchange has seen 8,394 ETH (about $12.8 million) in Sewer Pass transactions, with some passes selling for as much as 5.75 ETH (about $8,770).

While wash trading and/or crypto laundering could be driving some of those those Sewer Pass transactions, some players are clearly clamoring for access to Dookey Dash and are willing to spend to get it. But that demand isn't being driven by any sort of novel or transcendent gameplay experience that Yuga Labs is offering. Instead, NFT speculators are trying to use the game to get in on the ground floor of what they hope will be the next artificially scarce, high-demand digital asset.

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Facebook approves ads calling for children’s deaths in Brazil, test finds

Enlarge / Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva kisses a child onstage at the end of a speech to supporters. (credit: Horacio Villalobos / Contributor | Corbis News)

“Unearth all the rats that have seized power and shoot them,” read an ad approved by Facebook just days after a mob violently stormed government buildings in Brazil’s capital.

That violence was fueled by false election interference claims, mirroring attacks in the United States on January 6, 2021. Previously, Facebook-owner Meta said it was dedicated to blocking content designed to incite more post-election violence in Brazil. Yet today, the human rights organization Global Witness published results of a test that shows Meta is seemingly still accepting ads that do exactly that.

Global Witness submitted 16 ads to Facebook, with some calling on people to storm government buildings, others describing the election as stolen, and some even calling for the deaths of children whose parents voted for Brazil’s new president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Facebook approved all but two ads, which Global Witness digital threats campaigner Rosie Sharpe said proved that Facebook is not doing enough to enforce its own ad policies restricting such violent content.

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Amid economic downturn, space investment plummeted in 2022

Enlarge / Sir Richard Branson took to the sky in the summer of 2021. But since then, with no additional spaceflights, Virgin Galactic's stock has taken a nose dive. (credit: Virgin Galactic)

Private investment in the space sector declined by 58 percent in the year 2022, according to a new Space Investment Quarterly report from the firm Space Capital.

The $20.1 billion in private market equity investment last year is the lowest annual total since 2015, said Chad Anderson, the founder and managing partner of Space Capital. While early stage investments were largely unchanged, the large decline came in late- and growth-stage companies.

The report cites several factors for the pullback, including the fastest interest rate hike cycle since 1988, a challenging investment environment, and a continued economic recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic.

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GeForce Now Ultimate first impressions: Streaming has come a real long way

Enlarge / It's not actual GeForce RTX 4080 cards slotted into GeForce Now's "Superpods," but Nvidia says the hardware is pretty close. (credit: Nvidia)

Cloud-based gaming service GeForce Now's new Ultimate tier is rolling out today, promising a series of adjectives about game streaming that might have seemed impossible just a few years ago: high-resolution, ray-traced, AI-upscaled, low-latency, high-refresh-rate, and even competition-ready.

I tested out the Ultimate tier, powered by Nvidia's RTX 4080 "SuperPODs" on a server set up for reviewer early access, for a week. If I hadn't been hyper-conscious of frame numbers and hiccups, I could have been tricked into thinking the remote 4080 rig was local. Except when I was playing ray-traced games AAA games on systems that had no business playing them, like laptops with discrete GPUs, iPads, or my TV with no gaming console attached—that always felt weird, in a fun way.

Ars had previously described our GeForce Now 3080 experience as "dreamy" and called the performance "a white-hot stunner that rivals the computing power you can muster" with the same RTX 3080 card in your PC. It's easy to lay at least the same kind of praise on the new Ultimate tier. It replaces the previous RTX 3080 option with the next generation's chipset for the same price ($20 per month, $99 for six months). That might be a steep price tag for a service that mostly makes you buy your games, but given the 4080's $1,200 price tag, the rent-versus-buy question is worth considering at this level.

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Revisiting Apple’s ill-fated Lisa computer, 40 years on

Enlarge / Steve Jobs posing with the Lisa in 1983. (credit: Ted Thai)

Forty years ago today, a new type of personal computer was announced that would change the world forever. Two years later, it was almost completely forgotten.

The Apple Lisa started in 1978 as a new project for Steve Wozniak. The idea was to make an advanced computer using a bit-slice processor, an early attempt at scalable computing. Woz got distracted by other things, and the project didn’t begin in earnest until early 1979. That’s when Apple management brought in a project leader and started hiring people to work on it.

Lisa was named after Steve Jobs’ daughter, even though Jobs denied the connection and his parentage. But the more interesting thing about the Lisa computer was how it evolved into something unique: It was the first personal computer with a graphical user interface (GUI).

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How flood forecasts in real time with block-by-block data could save lives

Enlarge / A vehicle drives on a flooded road in Sebastopol, California, on January 5, 2023. (credit: Josh Edelson/AFP via Getty Images)

The extreme flooding and mudslides across California in recent weeks took many drivers by surprise. Sinkholes swallowed cars, highways became fast-moving rivers of water, entire neighborhoods were evacuated. At least 20 people died in the storms, several of them after becoming trapped in cars in rushing water.

As I checked the forecasts on my cellphone weather apps during the weeks of storms in early January 2023, I wondered whether people in the midst of the downpours were using similar technology as they decided whether to leave their homes and determined which routes were safest. Did they feel that it was sufficient?

I am a hydrologist who sometimes works in remote areas, so interpreting weather data and forecast uncertainty is always part of my planning. As someone who once nearly drowned while crossing a flooded river where I shouldn’t have, I am also acutely conscious of the extreme human vulnerability stemming from not knowing exactly where and when a flood will strike.

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It looks like NASA will finally have an astronaut live in space for a full year

Enlarge / NASA's Frank Rubio is on track to become the first American astronaut to spend a full year in space. (credit: NASA)

Amid much fanfare, NASA astronaut Scott Kelly returned from space nearly seven years ago, landing on a barren, frozen steppe of Kazakhstan inside a hardy little Soyuz spacecraft.

NASA made much of this flight, billing it as the agency's first year-long mission. PBS was among the broadcast television stations that did extended features on Kelly's mission, its multi-episode series was titled "A year in space." But the dirty little secret is that, due to the inevitable shuffling of schedules in spaceflight, Kelly and a Russia colleague, Mikhail Kornienko, spent 340 days in space rather than a full year of 365.25 days.

After Kelly's mission, NASA health officials said they hoped to fly more one-year missions as they sought to better understand the biological effects of long-duration spaceflight on humans and how the agency might better mitigate bone loss and other deleterious effects.

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Top-secret car design studios are hubs for the electric vehicle future

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

The most intriguing developments in contemporary car design are happening in secure studios tucked away from the competition. In these guarded locations, designers are charged with anticipating what will look and function well in three, four, and five years. It's not a clear-cut assignment. Car designers must operate in a hypothetical future where the rate of adoption and accessibility to public charging networks is still to be determined.

By 2026, almost 150 electric and hybrid vehicles are planned to hit the US market. While no designers are spilling the beans on their future plans, most are concentrating solely on designing the electric vehicles that will dominate their future portfolios. Some of their ideas will turn up in concept cars that serve as tools to tease innovations. Many of their best ideas won't see the light of day because of budgets, production limitations, and regulations. But electric vehicles are shaking up the way the industry thinks about design in every category.

Car design once meant hand-drawing plans and making clay models, a state of affairs that evolved into complex AutoCAD software for 3D renderings. In the past, plans had to be set in motion years before development. While these techniques are still used, new programs have accelerated the pace of car design and have made clay and sketching more efficient.

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Today’s best deals: Apple MacBook Air, Razer Blade, Google Pixel, and more

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It's Wednesday, which means it's time for another Dealmaster. Our latest roundup of the best tech deals from around the web includes a solid price for the latest M2-based Apple MacBook Air, Google's value-packed Pixel 6a, and the 15-inch Razer Blade gaming laptop, among other noteworthy deals.

For years, we've considered the MacBook Air to be the best Mac for most users. Blending long battery life, sleek design, and good performance, it easily handles most basic tasks any user might throw at it.

In our review of the 2022 model, we found that the M2 processor "makes this one of the most performant and efficient laptops on the market for general information work like browsing the web, working with documents, jumping on Zoom calls." It also has a great keyboard and trackpad. For $200 off, the $999 MacBook Air is a solid deal, albeit not the lowest we've ever tracked. If you don't mind going back one generation in processors to the M1, you'll be just as pleased handling similar workloads on a 2020 MacBook Air, which is on sale for $800 right now.

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Looming Twitter interest payment leaves Elon Musk with unpalatable options

Enlarge / Elon Musk’s personal equity investment in Twitter of about $26bn would be effectively wiped out in the event of a bankruptcy. (credit: FT Montage/Bloomberg)

The bill for Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter is coming due, with the billionaire facing unpalatable options on the company’s enormous debt pile, ranging from bankruptcy proceedings to another costly sale of Tesla shares.

Three people close to the entrepreneur’s buyout of Twitter said the first installment of interest payments related to $13 billion of debt he used to fund the takeover could be due as soon as the end of January. That debt means the company must pay about $1.5 billion in annual interest payments.

The Tesla and SpaceX chief financed his $44 billion deal to take Twitter private in October by securing the huge debt from a syndicate of banks led by Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Barclays and Mitsubishi. The $13 billion debt is held by Twitter at a corporate level, with no personal guarantee by Musk.

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The Chevrolet Corvette gets all-wheel drive hybrid power for 2024

Enlarge / The 2024 Corvette E-Ray adds all-wheel drive and hybrid power to the storied sportscar. (credit: Jonathan)

Chevrolet provided a train ticket from DC to New York City and back so we could take a ride in and be briefed about the 2024 Corvette E-Ray. Ars does not accept paid editorial content.

NEW YORK—Seventy years ago today, Chevrolet unveiled its first Corvette sports car in New York at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. Fast forward seven decades and January 17 sees another Corvette debut, this time the 2024 Corvette E-Ray. A new variant of the mid-engined eighth-generation (or C8) Corvette, the E-Ray brings a couple of new tricks to the party: namely, all-wheel drive and a hybrid system.

The hybrid Corvette has been some time coming. For starters, way back in 2015 we discovered that General Motors had filed a trademark on the E-Ray name. And when we got our first look at the new C8 in 2020, the central tunnel running the length of the cabin seemed superfluous for a mid-engined, rear-wheel drive car but did look like a good spot to stick a bunch of batteries.

"You were one of the people that may have figured that out early on that this car was always in the plan of record. And this structural transom, although it also has structure benefits for stiffness, makes a great place to put a lithium-ion 1.9 kWh battery pack," explained Cody Bulkley, a Corvette performance engineer at Chevrolet, as he drove me around Manhattan's West Side Highway in a bright-red E-Ray prototype.

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A history of ARM, part 3: Coming full circle

Enlarge (credit: Jeremy Reimer/Waldemar Brandt/NASA)

The story so far: As the 20th century came to a close, ARM was on the precipice of massive change. Under its first CEO, Robin Saxby, the company had grown from 12 engineers in a barn to hundreds of employees and was the preferred choice in RISC chips for the rapidly expanding mobile market. But the mobile and computer worlds were starting to merge, and the titans of the latter industry were not planning to surrender to the upstarts of the former. (This is the final article in a three-part series. Read part 1 and part 2.)

It started, as did many things in the ARM story, with Apple.

Steve Jobs had returned, triumphantly, to the company he had co-founded. The release of the colorful gumdrop iMacs in 1998, an agreement with Microsoft, and the sale of Apple’s ARM stock had brought the company from near-bankruptcy to a solid financial footing. But Apple’s “iCEO” was still searching for the next big thing.

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Reports: Twitter’s sudden third-party client lockouts were intentional

Enlarge / Twitter is blocking many third-party clients' access to its API while continuing to provide no explanation. (credit: Ryan J Lane/Getty Images)

Twitter has not yet explained why third-party clients like Twitterific and Tweetbot stopped working late last week. But a new report and testing by one app developer suggest the outages and lack of communication are intentional.

Internal Twitter Slack chat messages viewed by The Information (subscription required) show a senior software engineer writing in a "command center" channel that "third-party app suspensions are intentional." Another employee, asking about talking points to use when addressing the outages with product partners, was told by a product marketing manager that Twitter had "started to work on comms," but there was no delivery date, according to The Information's report.

Some Tweetbot users seemed to briefly regain account access early Sunday, without the ability to post, only to lose access again later. That resulted from Tweetbot co-creator Paul Haddad swapping out the app's API keys, but all of his keys were later revoked. That result "proves that this was intentional and we and others were specifically targeted," Haddad wrote on Mastodon Sunday evening, as noticed by The Verge.

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